May 20, 2017

Yes, Of Course, Apple Patented A Design For A Pizza Box

Pursuit of perfection pertains to pizza.

The box designed specifically to keep pizza from getting soggy. The photo at right was taken by Sam Thonis of The Outline, who secured one of the boxes. The associated food item may or may not be an Apple product.

As far as anyone knows, the box is not made of space age materials nor is it manufactured in China. JL

Gillie Houston reports in Munchies:

The pizza container patent
was filed by Apple in 2010 and has been in use for several years. The distinction is the perforated lid, which allow moisture
to escape, guaranteeing a less soggy slice. The base of the container is lined with elevated
rings which provide an air gap between the pizza and the material, and
the sidewalls are fortified to prevent
pie-crushing in transit. The sogginess-fighting design is only available for employees dining on the tech giant's campuses.

When it comes to groundbreaking technological innovations, Apple has been the force behind many of the most important devices of our time: the iPhone, the iPad, and now… a pizza box?
According to an in-depth look at Apple's shiny new spaceship-like campus by Wired, in addition to state-of-the-art facilities, an eye-catching aluminum design, and some of the greatest minds in the tech space, the new "Apple Park" campus will also be home to a specialized pizza container that can only be found within the tech giant's metallic kingdom.
The container, which can be identified by its circular design and ventilation holes along the lid, was designed in part by Francesco Longoni, Apple's head of food services, a.k.a. "the maestro of the Apple Park café." In an effort to provide Apple's workforce with the perfect pizza-buying experience, Longoni set out to create the ideal container, which would be guaranteed to keep the 'za from getting soggy in commute.

While a fancy pizza box might sound superfluous to the average slice aficionado, to the perfectionists at Apple, every design detail of their campus counts, right down to the containers. "The goal was to create an experience and an environment that felt like a reflection of who we are as a company. This is our home and everything we make in the future is going to start here," Chief Design Officer Jonathan Ive tells Wired of the campus's many fine-tuned innovations.
Though Apple Park will serve as the home of both the company and the pizza box of the future, the opening of the new Cupertino, California campus—which was the vision of Apple CEO Steve Jobs before his death in 2011—will not mark the debut of the patented container.
In fact, the pizza container patent was filed by Apple in 2010 and published in 2012, citing Longoni and Mark E. Doutt as the inventors, and it has been in use at Apple's existing campuses for several years. According to the filing, "the container includes a lid portion that is coupled to the base portion through a hinged connection such that the entire container is singularly constructed from a single piece of material," which pretty much sounds like a souped-up description of an average pizza box. However, the main distinction appears to lie in the perforated lid, which allow moisture to escape, guaranteeing a less soggy slice by the time it arrives at workers' pods. The base of the container is also lined with elevated rings, which provide an air gap between the pizza and the material, and the sidewalls are fortified to prevent any potentially devastating pie-crushing in transit. And while a sleek pizza box might not be considered Apple's most far-reaching invention to date, it may not be their most superfluous, either. In fact, the company recently filed a patent for their signature paper bag, which can be found shoved in the back the storage closets and desk drawers of countless Apple customers. As for the patented pizza box? That kind of life-altering product is reserved for diners in Apple's work utopia. The rest of us earthlings will have to settle for cardboard.

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As a Partner and Co-Founder of Predictiv and PredictivAsia, Jon specializes in management performance and organizational effectiveness for both domestic and international clients. He is an editor and author whose works include Invisible Advantage: How Intangilbles are Driving Business Performance.Learn more...